Every single store for almost a mile along Lee Avenue was closed for Shabbat.
This sign has seen some rough times since I last walked by in 2007.
Feltly Hats was featured in an NY Times story about Hasidic hats a couple of years ago.
You can tell it's a Jewish block — it's Shabbat, so no one's moved their car since the snow started falling early this morning.
I didn't realize I had been walking on snow for almost a mile until my feet hit clean sidewalk and I had to stop for a moment to figure out why everything felt different all of a sudden. Then I understood: I had reached the end of the Hasidic part of Williamsburg, where no one had been shoveling sidewalks because it's Shabbat. (For the record, this change occurred right by Peter Luger Steak House.)
Also at McGolrick Park, this statue commemorates the 1862 battle of the Monitor and Merrimac, the first-ever meeting of two ironclad warships in combat. The Monitor was built at the Continental Iron Works here in Greenpoint.
In case you can't tell, the images in those two circles are the reverse and observe of the Great Seal of the United States. Weird!
I was trying to photograph the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant (from the other side) when a fire engine came zooming into frame. Thanks to my camera's rolling shutter, objects in motion (e.g., the fire engine) become skewed, as you can see here.
According to a neighbor, an older Japanese man with a long white beard lives in this building. He can often be spotted running around Greenpoint, and he regularly participates in the NYC Marathon.
People here on Hausman street started flying American flags in the aftermath of 9/11, when one of their neighbors was killed in the collapse of the twin towers. Almost every building on the block has a flag now: I counted 59 of them as I walked down the street today. Bob McErlean, one of the residents of the block, has made it his job to maintain the flags, replace them if necessary, and properly dispose of those that are no longer suitable for display. A woman I met on the street told me that she just has to call him up if she has a problem with her flag, and he'll come over and take care of it. All of the fire hydrants and sign poles on the block are red, white, and blue, as well, but she says Bob had nothing to do with that — somebody else decided to paint them for the annual summer block party.
While the Parks Department claims this little triangle is "a tribute to those brave soldiers who fought and died in World War I", the park itself gives no indication of this, as far as I could tell. Instead, it seems to be dedicated to deceased members of the Knights of Columbus.
Greenpoint is the site of perhaps the largest oil spill in US history. Over the course of more than a century, somewhere between 17 and 30 million gallons of oil and petroleum products were leaked, spilled, and dumped into the soil and water by various refineries in the area. The descendants of those refining companies are now legally responsible for the cleanup effort, which consists primarily of pumping out contaminated groundwater, extracting the oil from it, and discharging the treated water into Newtown Creek. This photo shows the discharge point for water pumped and treated by ExxonMobil, and is also the location where a Coast Guard helicopter first observed the plume of oil flowing into Newtown Creek in 1978.
Google thinks it's a street, and it looked like one for about half a block, before I reached this mess. But it connects through to a real street on the other side, and there were no signs marking it as private property, so, just to be safe, I "walked" it.
I can see why Reduce and Reuse come first in the Holy Trinity.
